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CHAPTER 1

The Voices of Harley 2253

Each of the next two chapters explores how a manuscript compilation draws on and theorizes lyric tactics and demonstrates the ways in which medieval English records of lyrics articulate relations of practice. Because tactics are modes of relation, I examine multiple relationships within these compilations, from the broad compilational logic of the whole manuscript to more local interactions between a text, its page, and its surrounding texts. This approach has a natural affinity with studies of the so-called manuscript matrix, the method of philology that considers the place of individual texts within their books.¹ It also serves to elucidate an insular approach to lyric compilations that distinguishes them from their French counterparts, even as many of these English codices record French texts. Further, like much medieval literature, lyrics had a dual existence as performance and text. Yet where text is durable, persistent, and transtemporal, performance is transient, localized, and only partially documentable. Nonetheless, the marks of performance everywhere inflect written texts.² This chapter focuses on how tactical relationships between medieval performative and writing practices shape and are shaped by the lyric and nonlyric texts of one of the most important surviving collections of pre-Chaucerian lyric, British Library MS Harley 2253.

In particular, I explore how these texts represent and theorize voice, a feature of lyric that illuminates the tactical relationships between the performative and the textual. Voice is central to lyric, which is frequently characterized by modern critics as an “utterance,” yet medieval lyrics use voice in ways that confound post-Romantic models of the genre. While many of these poems do present a single lyric “I” that represents, in the words of Rosemary Woolf, “one-half of a dialogue” with an absent interlocutor, others thematize and exemplify the tactical qualities of lyric voices.³ Medieval theories of voice engage both its abstract and practical aspects, attending to both its textual (in the work of medieval grammarians) and its performative (in the work of medieval philosophers and rhetoricians) functions. As my discussion of these theories will reveal, there are institutional contexts and norms intended to govern both of these aspects of voice. But when the biological, performative, and literary features of voice converge in lyric texts, they navigate these norms erratically. This is not to say that voice is equivalent to tactics. Rather, inasmuch as theories of voice prescribe normative vocalizing practices, the ways in which lyrics move among writing and performance encourages, even necessitates, a tactical approach to these prescriptions. The rhetorical figure known as “ethopoeia,” which went under several different names in the Middle Ages, is helpful for understanding these tactics. As we shall see, this figure unites the affective, social, and circumstantial particulars of a speaker in literary voice.

The scribe-compiler of MS Harley 2253 interleaves prayers, dialogue poems, refrain poems, and single-voice poems in ways that draw on features of medieval and proto-modern theories of voice. Although not anthologized by genre, lyrics constitute an important class of texts within this compilation. As critics have increasingly noted, the relationship between the Harley lyrics and the other texts of this manuscript is less that of figure to ground than of tile to mosaic.⁴ Yet, as we shall see, these lyrics exemplify medieval theories of the relationship between voice and speaking subject that at once resonate with the manuscript’s nonlyric texts and distinguish lyric as a specific class of texts among them. The social, performative, and textual qualities of this kind of voice create not a single lyric “speaker” but rather voices for lyric readers, performers, and audiences that express tactical relationships to normative structures.

Most critics have agreed that the speaker of a medieval lyric is a chimera, less a definitive subject than a placeholder for successive writers, readers, or performers of the text.⁵ As we have seen in the previous chapter, the idea of a lyric speaker derives largely from post-Romantic definitions of the genre. If instead we consider lyric in terms of voice, we can draw on a rich body of medieval philosophical and scholastic theory. As the lyrics of MS Harley 2253 demonstrate, voice inheres in both performance and text in medieval theory and practice. To begin to understand how this works, consider the well-known Harley lyric, “When the Nightingale Sings”:

When the nyhtegale singes, the wodes waxen grene;	grow
Lef ant gras ant blosme springes in Averyl, Y wene,	burst forth
Ant love is to myn herte gon with one spere so kene!
Nyht ant day my blod hit drynkes. Myn herte deth me tene.	grieve
Ich have loved al this yer that Y may love namore;
Ich have siked moni syk, lemmon, for thin ore.	favor
Me nis love never the ner, ant that me reweth sore.	regret deeply
Suete lemmon, thench on me—Ich have loved the yore!	for a long time
Suete lemmon, Y preye the of love one speche;	word
Whil Y lyve in world so wyde, other nulle Y seche.	seek
With thy love, my suete leof, mi blis thou mihtes eche;	increase
A suete cos of thy mouth mihte be my leche.	kiss; medicine
Suete lemmon, Y preye the of a love-bene:	love-token
Yef thou me lovest ase men says, lemmon, as Y wene,	believe
Ant yef hit thi wille be, thou loke that hit be sene.
So muchel Y thenke upon the that al Y waxe grene.
Bituene Lyncolne ant Lyndeseye, Norhamptoun ant Lounde,	London
Ne wot Y non so fayr a may as Y go fore ybounde.	bound to
Suete lemmon, Y preye the, thou lovie me a stounde!	soon
Y wole mone my song
On wham that hit ys on ylong.6	the one who caused it

This lyric interleaves the conventions of the solitary love lament and the performative and petitionary love complaint. Beginning with the conventional reverdie opening, it situates itself within a tradition of erotic poetry: “When the nyhtegale singes, the wodes waxen grene.” Nature’s eros makes a poignant, if conventional, contrast to the lover’s pain: “Love is to myn herte gon with one spere so kene.” The lover’s sighs in the second stanza demonstrate how voice is a tactic of both performance and text. Sarah McNamer remarks that the devotional lyric, “I syke when y singe,” “script[s] sorrowful sighs for the reader to perform”; saying “I syke” compels the speaker to perform the sigh that the song describes.⁷ However, in its use of the past tense, “When the Nightingale Sings” textualizes this performance: “Ich have siked moni syk, lemmon, for thin ore.” The immediate performance context of this verse, then, is not that of pain but of petition: “Suete lemmon, thench on me.” As a complaint, this lyric “negotiates between feeling and form,” in the words of Lee Patterson.⁸ The lyric’s perpetuation of the textual voice—its knowing participation within the traditions of reverdie, love lament, and complaint—depends on the lover’s consent to its performance, as suggested in the final stanza. The direct address to the “suete lemmon,” prominent at the beginning of two stanzas, anticipates an audience that is at once present (as the addressee of these lines) and absent (as the audience of the deferred performance). As heartfelt as it seems, the voice of the love petition is not private but invokes a wider community (“Yef thou me lovest ase men says”; “loke that hit be sene”).

Although the poem’s final stanza has generally been understood as simply another quatrain, on stylistic grounds I would speculate that this stanza acts as an envoy, perhaps even a later addition, to the first four quatrains. The final line of the fourth stanza ends “al Y waxe grene,” an ironic echo of the first line’s “the wodes waxen grene.” “Grene” works as a pun in the fourth stanza, suggesting that the lover grows ill or lustful—or both—with thoughts of his beloved. Ending the poem here gives it stylistic closure that is of a piece with the use of repetition elsewhere in these stanzas, such as the anaphora of “suete lemmon.” The final stanza amplifies or transforms earlier lines, for instance, giving “world so wyde” the geographic specificity of “Bituene Lyncolne ant Lyndesey, Norhamptoun ant Lounde” and offering another “suete lemmon” line. The last line of the poem as it stands opens up a new frame, shifting from the implied immediate presence of the beloved (the “suete lemmon” addressed in the imperative) to the deferral of her presence (“Y wole mone my song”). This shift calls our attention to a second lyric voice (even if it is that of the same speaker). This stanza’s change in voice recalls the envoys or tornadas of French medieval poetry, from troubadour lyrics to motets, which often employed such a shift.⁹ As Judith Peraino puts it, French lyricists often used the final stanza to “graft” multiple voices into a single lyric, whether these were the voices of lover and beloved, master and minstrel, or even the public and private personae of the poet himself.¹⁰

The final stanza of “When the Nightingale Sings” is in many ways similar to the French envoy tradition, but certain differences are worth noting. Many of the French envoys name or encode the identity of the poet, and the irony or humor in their vocal shifts is dependent on recognizing this identity. This poet, while firmly anonymous, is by no means what Leo Spitzer, in a seminal essay, calls an “everyman” whose words are completely fungible. Spitzer’s categorization relies on texts where a known author appropriates language that cannot possibly apply to him or her, usually by direct quotation or literal translation. In one example, he cites a passage from Marie de France where she claims personal experience of a story’s teller in an echo of the original but elsewhere acknowledges her use of a written source.¹¹ The final stanza of “When the Nightingale Sings” uses voice differently. While drawing on the French envoy tradition, it neither directly appropriates its language nor relies on the poet’s identity for its effect. Instead, this stanza transforms the French convention tactically, suggesting an expansive but not limitless range of possibilities for its speaker, who would be familiar with the women and terrain “Bituene Lyncolne ant Lyndeseye, Norhamptoun ant Lounde.” In other words, while much of the poem consists of an arrangement of conventional lyric language (though beautifully executed), the final stanza locates this conventional language within a specific horizon of practices. As we will see, this poem’s compilation and layout in MS Harley 2253 amplifies how its voice mediates between such textual and performative practices, which in turn informs the arrangement of the larger miscellany.

To understand how this works in the manuscript as a whole, it is helpful to consider how medieval theories of voice express its multimodal capacities and how these can be put in dialogue with modern discussions of lyric voice. This discussion occupies the first half of this chapter. The second half of the chapter provides an overview of the manuscript’s contents and social context and reads a selection of English and French lyrics from the manuscript, both well known and lesser known, as well as some of the manuscript’s Latin devotional texts.

Voice and the Lyric

Voice is where sound meets language, a grammatically vexed and poetically fertile medium fundamental to human communication. In this section, I show that in medieval theory, voice—particularly literary voice—is inherently tactical, articulating relationships between writing and performance and between a subject’s interiority and his external world. In medieval philosophy, grammar, and music theory, theories of voice rely on and elucidate ontological distinctions. Aristotle says that vox—here meaning voice or even “vocal sound”—consists of “a certain kind of sound belonging to what has a soul” that has signifying power.¹² While musical instruments produce a sound similar to voice, only living beings—including animals—have voices. In Aquinas’s commentary on this passage, voice is what turns meaning into sound: “Not every sound belonging to an animal is a vocal sound. For the tongue may make some sounds that are nevertheless not instances of vocal sound—just as those who cough make a sound that is not a vocal sound. For if there is to be vocal sound, what forces the air [against the windpipe] must be something with a soul, along with some imagination intended to signify something. For a vocal sound must be a certain significant sound, either naturally or by convention.”¹³

For Aristotle and Aquinas, voice is produced by, yet distinct from, a speaking subject. It is the medium through which a subject’s internal image—stored in the imaginative faculty—encounters the external world. Because voice in these definitions is not only a linguistic medium, medieval grammarians further distinguished types of voice by their semantic potential. According to Donatus, “Every sound [vox] is either articulate or confused. Articulate sound can be captured in letters, confused sound cannot be written.”¹⁴ Priscian describes four different types of vox based on two binary pairs: articulate or inarticulate (depending on whether the sound has intentional meaning) and literate or illiterate (depending on whether it is writable). He acknowledges that unwritable sounds (such as a human groan) may have meaning, and writable sounds (such as a nonsense word or transcribed animal noise) may lack signification.¹⁵ Later grammarians drew on these four types to classify sounds ranging from human spoken language, applause, and whistling to animal noises and the sounds of natural phenomena like crashing waves.¹⁶

The difference between Donatus’s and Aristotle’s definitions of vox captures a medieval concern with the relationship between voice and speaker. Whereas for Aristotle, the ontological status of the producer of sound determined whether or not it was a “voice,” for Donatus and the early grammarians, a sound’s resolution into the phonetic alphabet was central. This association between writing and voice not only speaks to grammar’s close relationship to performed oratory in the early period (it was a foundational discipline for the study of rhetoric) but also reveals how writing and voice are co-constitutive in premodern culture. Their interdependence is particularly evident in drama: the multivocal drama of ancient Greece owes its conception to a phonetic alphabet that weds sound to letters, for example, and medieval drama borrows many of its conventions from legal rhetoric.¹⁷

But while access to writing was controlled, in the Middle Ages, by institutions of literacy like the schools and the church, voice is a biological attribute shared by humans and animals. As poets have long recognized, human language draws on both aspects of voice, its grammatical and systematic principles and its nonrepresentative sounds. Ezra Pound described these, respectively, as logopoeia (meaning) and melopoeia (sound).¹⁸ Later medieval grammarians like John of Garland recognized both aspects of language. In addition to his better-known Poetria Parisiana (discussed in the next chapter), John composed an “equivocal” grammar, a medieval genre of long poem that distinguishes and contextualizes like-sounding words.¹⁹ As he puts it in the prologue to this poem, “equivocum celat sub eadem plurima voce, / quorum nomen idem” (an equivocum hides under a voice [word] these many [meanings], which have the same name).²⁰ The treatise (like others in the genre) distinguishes among like-sounding words in a mnemonic verse:

Augustus, -ti, -to Cesar vel mensis habeto,

Augustus, -tus, -ui vult divinacio dici

Mobile si fiat, augustus nobile signat,

Augeo dat primum, dant gustus avisque secundum.

[Augustus, -ti, -to means Caesar or the month (of August); Augustus, -tus, -ui means divination. If it becomes an adjective, augustus means noble. The verb “augeo” (to grow) gives us the first meaning; “gustus” (taste) and “auis” (bird/omen) give us the second.]²¹

Just as equivocal grammars unite the melodic and grammatical qualities of voice, rhetorical treatises also give primacy of place to voice, an essential component of the rhetorical canon of actio, or delivery. Quintilian acknowledges that a “good voice” is among the natural gifts necessary for success in oratory²² and devotes part of his discussion of delivery to the correction of vocal infelicities: “Again our teacher must not tolerate the affected pronunciation of the s, with which we are so familiar, nor suffer words to be uttered from the depth of the throat or rolled out hollow-mouthed, or permit the natural sound of the voice to be over-laid with a fuller sound, a fault fatal to the purity of speech.”²³ The ethics of oratory are implicit in the privileged faculty of speech: “If therefore we have received no fairer gift from heaven than speech, what shall we regard as so worthy of laborious cultivation, or in what should we sooner desire to excel our fellow-men, than that in which mankind excels all other living things?”²⁴

Following the newfound popularity of the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium in the twelfth century, delivery became a subject of serious rhetorical discourse in the later Middle Ages, as well as an influence on the broader culture, permeating scholastic treatises and performative practice.²⁵ The Herennium describes tones of voice appropriate for different kinds of material: “Conversational tone comprises four kinds: the Dignified, the Explicative, the Narrative, and the Facetious. The Dignified, or Serious, Tone of Conversation is marked by some degree of impressiveness and by vocal restraint. The Explicative in a calm voice explains how something could or could not have been brought to pass. The Narrative sets forth events that have occurred or might have occurred. The Facetious can on the basis of some circumstance elicit a laugh which is modest and refined.”²⁶ The author then proceeds to describe the physical qualities of each tone. For example: “For the Dignified Conversational Tone it will be proper to use the full throat but the calmest and most subdued voice possible, yet not in such a fashion that we pass from the practice of the orator to that of the tragedian. For the Explicative Conversational Tone one ought to use a rather thin-toned voice, and frequent pauses and intermissions, so that we seem by means of the delivery itself to implant and engrave in the hearer’s mind the points we are making in our explanation.”²⁷ To a later medieval audience, the Herennium’s distinctions among oratorical voices might well have recalled Isidore of Seville’s discussion of song and its varieties of voice: “A song (cantus) is the voice changing pitch, for sound is even-pitched; and sound precedes song. Arsis (arsis) is elevation of the voice, that is, the beginning. Thesis (thesis) is lowering the voice, that is, the end. Sweet (suavis) voices are refined and compact, distinct and high. Clear (perspicuus) voices are those that are drawn out further, so that they continually fill whole spaces, like the blaring of trumpets.”²⁸

In short, the concept of voice integrates theory and practice in several medieval liberal arts. The qualities of vocal expression were understood to be artful, in rhetorical delivery and in singing, as well as meaningful. Thus, discussions of voice in these treatises reveal the performative foundations of medieval knowledge practice. The alliance of knowledge and its delivery is perhaps best expressed in John of Salisbury’s introduction to the Metalogicon:

Just as eloquence, unenlightened by reason, is rash and blind, so wisdom, without the power of expression, is feeble and maimed. Speechless wisdom may sometimes increase one’s personal satisfaction, but it rarely and only slightly contributes to the welfare of human society. Reason, the mother, nurse, and guardian of knowledge, as well as of virtue, frequently conceives from speech, and by this same means bears more abundant and richer fruit. Reason would remain utterly barren, or at least would fail to yield a plenteous harvest, if the faculty of speech did not bring to light its feeble conceptions, and communicate the perceptions of the prudent exercise of the human mind.²⁹

Far from a transparent medium of knowledge, voice here is generative and productive, “fecund.” Indeed, in the twelfth century, eloquentia (communication) came to be regarded as half of knowledge, complementing philosophia (content). Despite detractors who criticized the tendency toward garrulity in the champions of eloquence, voiced language was increasingly recognized as the medium of social negotiation, “an important part of a corpus of attitudes, behaviors, skills and science that kept civil society alive.”³⁰

For lyric poets and audiences, the relationship between physical voice and literary or textual voice is codified in the rhetorical device of ethopoeia. The earliest known description of the figure appears in Aphthonius’s fourth-century Progymnasmata, a late antique rhetorical handbook: “Ethopoeia is imitation of the character of a proposed speaker. There are three different forms of it: apparition-making (eidolopoeia), personification (prosopopoeia) and characterization (ethopoeia). Ethopoeia has a known person as a speaker and only invents the characterization, which is why it is called ‘character-making’; for example, what words Heracles would say when Eurystheus gave his commands. Here Heracles is known, but we invent the character in which he speaks.”³¹ In Aphthonius’s definition, ethopoeia is the umbrella figure for all invented speech, with distinctions for the ontological status of the speaker. The ethopoetic speaker is “known” (a historical or literary figure) and alive, the eidolopoetic speaker is known and dead, and the prosopopoetic speaker is invented. There are further three modes of ethopoetic speech: affective, circumstantial, or a mixture of the two.³²

The Progymnasmata gained new popularity in the early modern period following its 1572 translation by Reinhard Lorich, and no evidence exists of its use during the medieval period.³³ Yet grammatical and rhetorical treatises popular in medieval schoolrooms discuss the composition of ethopoetic speeches, often under one of the following figures: adlocutio, conformatio, sermocinatio, fictio personae, prosopopoeia.³⁴ In a rare medieval use of Aphthonius’s term, Isidore of Seville offers the following definition:

We call that ‘ethopoeia’ whereby we represent the character of a person in such a way as to express traits related to age, occupation, fortune, happiness, gender, grief, boldness. Thus when the character of a pirate is taken up, the speech will be bold, abrupt, rash; when the speech of a woman is imitated, the oration ought to fit her sex. A distinct way of speaking ought to be used for young and old, soldier and general, parasite and rustic and philosopher. One caught up in joy speaks one way, one wounded, another. In this genre of speech these things should be most fully thought out: who speaks and with whom, about whom, where, and when, what one has done or will do, or what one can suffer if one neglects these decrees.³⁵

Isidore’s definition expresses the idea that written representations of speech can vary according to both affective and social factors: status, occupation, gender, mood, and situation of address. The Rhetorica ad Herennium describes, under the figure of conformatio, “making a mute thing or one lacking form articulate, and attributing to it a definite form and a language or a certain behavior appropriate to its character.”³⁶ Priscian’s definition of adlocutio (“impersonation”) is ethopoetic:

Impersonation is the imitation of speech accommodated to imaginary situations and persons.… Speeches of impersonation can be addressed either to particular persons or to indefinite ones.… There are simple forms of impersonation, as when one creates a speech as though he were speaking to himself; and there are double impersonations, as though he were speaking to others.… Always, however, be careful to preserve the character of the persons and times being imagined: some words are appropriate to the young, some to the old, some to the joyful, some to the sad. Moreover, some impersonations have to do with manners, some with passions, and some with a mixture of the two.³⁷

Geoffrey of Vinsauf provides an example of the speech of a pope as a kind of “refining by dialogue” (expolitio per sermocinationem): “Oh how marvelous the virtue of God! How mighty his power! How great I now am! How insignificant I once was! From a small stock I have grown in a trice to a mighty cedar.”³⁸ Elsewhere in the Poetria Nova, Geoffrey parodies the figure. The discarded tablecloth grieves, “I was once the pride of the table, while my youth was in its first flower and my face knew no blemish. But since I am old, and my visage is marred, I do not wish to appear.”³⁹ With its focus on the particularity of experience, ethopoeia had a natural affinity for the rhetorical study of personal “attributes,” elaborated in Matthew of Vendôme’s Ars Versificatoria (1175) and the anonymous Tria Sunt (1256–1400).⁴⁰

Schoolroom exercises in ethopoeia and related figures were practiced from late antiquity (Augustine won a contest for his speech voicing Juno’s rage at her powerlessness to keep Aeneas out of Italy) to the early modern period.⁴¹ In antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the figure was used to teach letter writing, and a few examples, in which ethopoeia appears among a broader range of rhetorical figures, survive from the later Middle Ages.⁴² This practice encouraged students, some of whom became poets, to think about evoking a character with a voice that conveys his or her particular experience of emotions, social codes, and mores. It is perhaps difficult for us, who largely expect literary voices to do these very things, to appreciate how specific a use of voice this is and, further, how it establishes a literary convention that synthesizes a character’s inner and outer life by means of his or her voice. Some of the most poignant passages in Chaucer’s long poems are ethopoetic interludes, from Criseyde’s lament for her lost reputation (“Thorughout the world my belle shal be ronge”) to Dido’s lament in the House of Fame.⁴³ (This figure was considered particularly suitable for the representation of female grief.) Further, to a medieval rhetorician, the soliloquy and the dialogue existed on an ethopoetic continuum, the dialogue being a juxtaposition of alternating ethopoetic utterances.⁴⁴

Ethopoeia, then, is a figure of represented speech that is at once subjective and objective, affective and circumstantial. It is inherently tactical because it improvises rhetorically on a set of known circumstances from myth or history. Moreover, the ethopoetic voice of medieval lyric is distinct from the voice of the “speaking subject” that characterizes post-Romantic lyric theory. As I discussed in the introduction, Hegel defined lyric as the genre that takes as its content “not the object but the subject, the inner world, the mind that considers and feels, that instead of proceeding to action, remains alone with itself as inwardness, and that therefore can take as its sole form and final aim the self-expression of the subjective life.”⁴⁵ This model of voice was most cogently critiqued by structuralist and poststructuralist thought. In Voice and Phenomenon, Derrida critiques the Western metaphysics that identifies an “inner voice” of thought with self-presence. For Derrida, the figure of the inner voice creates the fiction of self-presence, but the very fact of figuring it as a voice puts thought into the realm of signification. That is, an “inner voice” of thought is subject to the différance and the fundamental instability of representation that Derrida would more famously attribute to writing.⁴⁶ Yet as David Lawton has recently discussed, literary voice, especially in medieval literature, is qualitatively different. It creates what he calls “public interiorities,” which project subjective expression into the public, or social, realm. These voices are characterized by “unstable reproducibility”; they can be endlessly iterated but without any presumption of fidelity to an original.⁴⁷

Scholars of medieval literature have long recognized the slippery relationship between lyric voice and speaking subject. Who is it who says “I”? Anglo-American critics have frequently answered this question with recourse to Leo Spitzer’s classic essay on the “I” as an “everyman”: “in the Middle Ages, the ‘poetic I’ had more freedom and more breadth than it has today: at that time the concept of intellectual property did not exist because literature dealt not with the individual but with mankind: the ‘ut in pluribus’ was an accepted standard.”⁴⁸ Spitzer’s model accounts for what he sees as the free substitution of one “I” for another, especially in prefaces and poetry. This suggestion was later developed by Rosemary Woolf, in her description of the “genuinely anonymous” religious meditative lyrics whose plain style willfully resists the development of an individual poetic voice in favor of universality, and by Judson Boyce Allen, who describes certain medieval English lyrics as “sublimat[ing]” the individual ego in the lyric ego.⁴⁹ Most recently, A. C. Spearing has argued that in medieval literature, the poetic “I” inheres not in the speaker but in the text. In lyrics in particular, “the ‘I’ is little more than an empty space, waiting to be occupied by any reader.” For Spearing, what this text ultimately represents is the written word, whose point of origin is the poet, not a lyric speaker. In one poem, “the inner life evoked as the medium for the trivial outward incidents recalled seems to me to be specifically that of the writer … the ‘I’ as writer, rather than the ‘I’ to whom the events recorded originally occurred.”⁵⁰ While Spearing’s critique of a critical tendency to see the “speaker” of a medieval poem as a literary character (an approach deriving ultimately from Wimsatt’s and Beardsley’s idea of lyric poetry as dramatic monologue) is a welcome and necessary correction to an overly simplistic reading practice, in rejecting the totalizing of the speaker, he ends up totalizing the text. Although it draws on Derrida’s critique of the voice as self-presence, Spearing’s analysis more directly recalls older New Critical reading practices that evacuate historical particularity from a text.

The French critical tradition has tended toward structuralist and poststructuralist analyses of the “I” as a purely linguistic and grammatical phenomenon (most notably in the work of Paul Zumthor). Yet in response to the influence of structuralism on French medieval lyric criticism, some scholars have argued for the centrality of subjectivity to poetic and particularly lyric texts. Michel Zink traces the affiliation of lyric with affective subjective expression as a result of a literary history in which other medieval genres—satire, drama, and prose narrative—carve out distinct formal and thematic areas that by comparison mark lyric as the genre of individual expression.⁵¹ Further, as Sarah Kay notes, social and historical circumstances inflect such signifying lyric voices: “historical factors such as gender and economic status, relationships with authors and patrons, leave perceptible traces on the subjective voice.… The ‘individual’ need not be conceived of contrastively, as differing in some essential way from others. The historical influences which combine with different discourses to construct the sense of self necessarily contribute features which are held in common with other selves.”⁵²

Ethopoeia figures the structural, circumstantial, and public aspects of the first-person pronoun, acknowledging its own rhetorical artifice within a trope that accommodates social circumstance and difference. Some of this has to do with the historically specific conceptions of subjectivity and interiority that inhered in medieval thought. It has been amply demonstrated that a turn toward interiority, beginning in the twelfth century and elaborated, especially, in medieval religious writings, penitential discourse, and secular literature, marked the later Middle Ages. Yet scholars of the Middle Ages remain divided on whether premodern subjectivity is marked by an opposition, even an antagonism, between the inner self and the outer world or whether these are contiguous.⁵³ Medieval uses of ethopoeia demonstrate that voice expresses a relationship between internal and external, between self and world. Ultimately, though, ethopoeia is premised on the inherent performativity of all utterances, as a figure for speech that integrates affect and circumstance in order to communicate to a public.⁵⁴ Ethopoeia bears some relationship to the idea of a lyric “persona,” but it also differs in important ways from this modern concept. Chiefly, where a poetic persona is presumed to represent a complex, total subject, an ethopoetic voice is an utterance specific to both a speaker and his or her local and contingent circumstances: the words of Andromache over Hector’s corpse or of the tablecloth once discarded. My emphasis on an ethopoetic lyric voice that integrates text and performance also has some affinity with recent work on the performativity of medieval lyric reading practices.⁵⁵ However, these tend to locate the lyric’s performativity in the inner experience of the reader or performer, whereas my account emphasizes the full spectrum of transmission practice of medieval lyrics, comprising interiority, performance, grammatical and rhetorical conventions, and material witnesses.

What I am proposing, in short, is that the ethopoetic voice of the medieval lyric “I” is a tactic in the practice of the genre. As we have seen, the medieval concept of voice engages both its performative and textual qualities. Ethopoeia, in some sense, makes lyrics with ad hoc improvisations on the conventions of both textual and performative voices. We have seen one instance of this in our analysis of the vocal shift in the envoy of “When the Nightingale Sings”; the next section will demonstrate how ethopoetic tactics inform the compilation and layout of lyric and nonlyric texts throughout MS Harley 2253. It is helpful at this point to refer to Michel de Certeau’s description of the interaction between orality and the written text in contemporary culture, which offers a surprisingly apt way of understanding the voices of Harley 2253. In his discussion of the modern “scriptural economy,” Certeau describes writing as an essentially strategic practice that produces a text on the regulated blank space of the page.⁵⁶ Although often presented as oppositional to writing, orality is implicated in such a scriptural economy, since like writing, it is not unitary but plural and historically determined. To escape the power structures produced by the scriptural economy, Certeau concludes his discussion with an impassioned if vague call for “transformations” as a tactical alternative to writing: “Henceforth the important thing is neither what is said (a content) nor the saying itself (an act), but rather the transformation, and the invention of still unsuspected mechanisms that will allow us to multiply the transformations.”⁵⁷

Certeau’s scriptural economy is a product of capitalism and as such not directly applicable to premodern textual culture. However, the blank space of the medieval manuscript page is equally as regulated as the modern printed page, and its texts are equally reliant on practices of orality and writing. What the figure of ethopoeia suggests is a rhetoric that navigates these practices tactically, drawing on the conventions of each mode to produce lyric poetry. The ethopoetic voice makes its texts from the contingent relations between composer and audience, scribe and poet and reader.

The Tactics of Voice